Terror attack in Dayton--Muslims involved

I'm no fan of Islam (or any other religion, for that matter), but in this "war of civilizations", aren't the Muslims supposed to be the bad guys? If that's the case, what about someone who gasses innocent children?

Friday, September 26, 2008

Quick Thoughts on the Debate

I thought it was mostly a draw. That, however, is a win for Obama. I thought Obama presented himself as a credible and knowledgeable commander in chief, which he needed to do. I also think he did well in avoiding the pondering that he's been criticized for in prior debates. On the other hand, he failed to capitalize as well as he could have on McCain's vulnerabilities, including McCain's natural tendency to react without thinking.

I can see that McCain had it drilled into him to keep repeating "What Senator Obama doesn't understand . . .", but it will be interesting to see how people respond to that, given that Obama so clearly did understand what he was talking about.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

McCain: My guy Gramm caused this problem, now let us fix it

We were talking yesterday about AIG, its collapse, and why the mortgage crisis would hurt insurance companies, and I had no idea. Since then I've heard an excellent interview on Fresh Air and done some reading on the topic, and I think I have a bit of an answer. I may be missing some of the details, but it looks pretty damning for McCain and his economic plans.

It didn't actually deregulate anything, it just prohibited the federal government from regulating a new, and little-known financial instrument called a swap. You may never have heard of a swap, but the swaps are what made the saps at AIG go down.

Now just keep that little bit of history in your mind for a while. Time goes on, the real estate market goes crazy, and people with money burning a hole in their pockets figure that a way to make tons more money is to bet on the following two propositions: real estate prices will always go up, and people who don't have the ability to pay their mortgages will somehow pay them. This bet leads banks and fly-by-night mortgage outfits to start lending out tons of money, even more than the house is worth, and even to people who have bad credit, their income doesn't meet standard underwriting standards, and so on. They then bundle up a whole bunch of these mortgages and sell them on the secondary market in the form of various kinds of securities. I guess the idea is that even if some of the mortgages don't perform, they will be bundled together with a bunch of other very profitable mortgages, so it's a safe bet. (Would you lend the price of a house to someone who doesn't have the money to pay it back? Me neither, but maybe that's why we're not smart enough to run Countrywide or these big banks.)

But, it's not really a safe bet, because it's not safe enough to get reasonably prudent investors to buy them. The risk is too much. However, we've known for a long time how to get people to invest their money in something when they think the risk of losing it all would be too great. It's called insurance. You wouldn't spend $10,000 or 20,000 on a car, or $100,000 or $200,000 on a house, if you thought that you would just be wiped out if the car or the house were destroyed and you were just out the money. Some people won't even spend $1,000 or $2,000 on a vacation without buying insurance on it.

So they figured out that they can just insure this risk too. That's what a swap is. They created an instrument called a credit default swap, in which Investor A pays a premium to Company B, and Company B promises Investor A that if one of the borrowers fails to pay their mortgage, Company B will step in and pay Investor A their investment. Company B gets their money, Investor A gets to make the investment and to receive the income that the investment is going to generate, and it's all possible because of the swap. That's what AIG was selling.

So what, you say? We have insurance for all kinds of things, and all kinds of bad things happen without insurance companies going out of business. People get into car crashes, trees fall on houses, vacations get rained out, and the insurance companies just pay off the policy holder and move on. How do they do it? There's a one-word answer: regulation. Your state government won't let me to call myself a car insurance company, and start collecting car insurance premiums, unless I can prove that I have enough money on hand to pay off the claims. Homeowners' insurance, the same thing.

But now we go back to Phil Gramm, and his midnight Christmas present to the money men. The law he wrote (oh yes, and if I think back to 2000, I'm pretty sure John McCain was in the Senate that year; there's the experience thing) said that these credit default swaps cannot be regulated. The government can't stop me from selling credit default swaps, even if I'm just a guy sitting in my basement in Montpelier, and it can't make me prove that I have enough money to pay off the claims.

And that's where we are today. Property values stop going up. A bunch of those mortgagors (they're the borrower--remember, "Mortgagee rhymes with Simon Legree") reach into their pocket and come up empty, so they default on their mortgages. The banks have to foreclose, and the people who own the mortgage-backed securities start looking around for someone to cover their losses, and who's standing their with their face hanging out? AIG, which sold them these credit default swaps, these promises that if the mortgages didn't perform, they'd be good for the money.

Only because of Phil Gramm, John McCain, and the other guys who voted for Gramm's bill, nobody ever made AIG set the money aside in case the loss they were insuring should happen.

And now, whose economic ideas are in the head of John McCain, the candidate who admits he doesn't know anything about the economy?

Right, Phil Gramm's.

So tell me, how much sense does it make to turn the economy over to McCain and Gramm?

No elitists need apply

Sometimes these things just write themselves.

The Republican rap on Obama is that he's an elitist, right? A guy who was raised by a single mother on Food Stamps, got to college on scholarship, went to law school on student loans--elitist all over, right?

Now we have confirmation of that characterization by one of Hillary Clinton's supporters and fundraisers, who announced today that she's supporting McCain.

And her name is . . .

Wait for it . . .

You guessed it. It's Everywoman, known to her friends as Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, international financier who splits her time between homes in New York and London.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Real news coverage on Palin

Today the Times has an in-depth article about Sarah Palin's days as a mayor and governor in Alaska, and it sure doesn't look good. This is a big deal because, as you know, they've been trumpeting her terms as mayor and governor as an example of the managerial experience that Obama and Biden lack. Or, as McBush's speech writers put it in Palin's speech, the difference between being a mayor and a community organizer is that when you're a mayor you have to get things done.

Things like:Trying to censor library books when she was a member of the city council;Firing the city attorney when he was interfering with a developer and longtime Palin crony;Firing the director of the town museum and forcing out the remaining three employees;Firing the director of the town library after she refused Palin's suggestion about censoring materials;Making political campaign calls from her city office.

Of course, her record of accomplishment doesn't stop there. As governor she:Installed a high school classmate and former real estate agent as agriculture commissioner, with the qualification that when she was a child she liked cows;Stonewalled a professor seeking state government studies supporting her claim that polar bears were not endangered (hint--when he got them from the federal government it turns out they said the opposite of what she claimed);Fired the attorney general and installed a solo practitioner to run the 500-person office;Installed two other unqualified high school friends as her legislative director and director of economic director (actually, if running a Mailboxes, Etc. franchise qualifies you to be the economic development director for the whole state, maybe he was qualified);Used her personal e-mail account for state business in order to block public access.

Now that I think about it, she pretty much has all the qualifications needed for a Bush, and consequently McCain, administration: a fanatical commitment to secrecy; loyalty to old friends and cronies as a paramount value; and a determination to exact revenge on anyone who dares to oppose her.

Vote suppression again

It's so reliable you can set your calendar by it. Every election year, and especially every presidential election, the Republican Party does its best to pervert the republican form of government required by our Constitution to ensure that the people do not have the chance to vote to protect their own interests. In addition, we know that the Republican dominance of the last forty years has been built on a foundation of racism and racial discrimination, primarily in the South, but really wherever they can gain control of the mechanisms of voting. See, for instance, the examples of Florida's fraudulent voter list purge in 2000 and Ohio's subversion of the voting system in 2004. Nevertheless, this week we have two particularly odious examples.

In Wisconsin, the attorney general, who also happens to be McCain's state campaign chair, has filed a suit designed to slow down voting lines and drive voters away from the polls.

I know, I know. You thought that people are supposed to vote, it's an aspect of good citizenship, and everyone's civic duty. The problem is, when "certain people" vote it's just a bit inconvenient for the Republicans. Keep them away from the polls, and problem solved!

Bad as that is, though, what they're doing in Michigan, where I used to live, is even more loathsome. Really, beneath contempt: they're making sure that people who have lost their homes through foreclosure will also lose the right to vote.

Palin's Pastor Agrees God Punishes Jews Who Don't Convert

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Primary News

It's primary day here in Vermont. Yes, even though the general election is just eight weeks away, this is when we have our primaries.

The big news is in Montpelier. We had three candidates running for our two House of Representatives seats: incumbents Warren Kitzmiller and Jon Anderson, and challenger Mary Hooper, the mayor of a city about the size of Wasilla, Alaska. Most Democrats were unhappy with Anderson when, after being appointed by our Republican governor, voted to sustain a veto in his first vote on the job. Still, he knocked on almost every door in the city, had yard signs all over the place (even, or should I say especially, in Republican neighborhoods), so he was given a good shot at holding onto his seat.Tonight the votes are in: Mary Hooper--900Warren Kitzmiller--829Jon Anderson--583.I guess the people have spoken.

Then, look to the Midwest. After a fast start, followed by a few stumbles, the man running for the chance to be the funniest member of the U.S. Senate has made it to the general election. As Franken has won Minnesota's DFL primary, setting him up to run against Republican nonentity Norm Coleman in the general election.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

The Story of Two Books

Friday, September 05, 2008

You knew it was coming

After the Harold Ford campaign two years ago, and, for that matter, forty years of Republican tactics, we knew that the racist attacks on Obama were on the way. Arguably we've seen them already in the commercials juxtaposing Obama with young white women like Paris Hilton.

Still, you have to figure that they weren't planning on being this blatant about it. This comment by a Deep South Republican inadvertently reveals what they really think about the idea of having a black president:

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Hypocrisy Now! (Daily Show)

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

The Republicans can't buy a break, can they?

They go to church, often many times a week, they pray, they (sometimes) abstain from sin, and what do they ask for in return? Not much. Well, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, right? And sometimes they get it.

But every so often you need a little extra favor from the Big Guy. "Come on, Lord, help me out this one time and smite my enemies!" Doesn't seem like too much to ask, does it?

Apparently it is. First off, right-wing loony Dobson got it into his head that if Obama was going to show them all up by speaking outside, he would get his disciples to pray for rain:

And what happened? A beautiful, sunny day. You couldn't ask for a nicer day if you tried, and it was followed by a beautiful night and a great night for the "godless" Democrats. So what, god doesn't like the Republicans anymore?

And then this week, once again what were they asking for? Not much, really. Just send down a massive hurricane to smite the godless city of New Orleans, kind of like the one three years ago. It would be a win-win. The people would be fine, because the government is so much better at planning for this thing than they were three years ago; the Republicans would get to grandstand their empathy for the poor suffering people of New Orleans and pretend they give a rat's ass about the poor people who live there; and McCain would get to have the mother of all photo ops by flying down there to do his acceptance speech in the midst of the rubble. What could be better?

Monday, September 01, 2008

Amy Goodman Arrested at RNC

I'm taking the unusual step of posting a press release in its entirety because of its importance:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEwww.democracynow.org

September 1, 2008

Contact:Dennis MoynihanMike Burke

ST. PAUL, MN—Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul.

Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar. These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amenmdent rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which they were arrested law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. Several dozen others were also arrested during this action.

Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists in the United States. She has received journalism’s top honors for her reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar is a transparent attempt to intimidate journalists from the nation’s leading independent news outlet.

Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicated public TV and radio program that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the globe.

Tons of information on Sarah Palin

Cokie Roberts was just on NPR talking about the contrast between the selection of Sarah Palin and the selection of J. Danforth Quayle twenty years ago. As she put it, Palin is an unknown, whereas when Bush 41 picked Quayle, the entire Washington press corps already knew he was a lightweight.

This time around, we don't know much, so there's a lot to learn, and I've been doing a lot of checking.

First off, we already know she tried to interfere with the procedures of a state agency to get her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper, and she's now being investigated for that.

I've also found a bunch of progressive blogs up in Alaska that know enough to take a critical look at her.